In the 1940s, Nick Gabaldón, an athletic, handsome student at Santa Monica High School, would often escape class to Bay Street Beach, a half-mile stretch of shoreline roughly between Pico and Bicknell Streets, by the Casa Del Mar hotel. Derisively called the Inkwell by some white Angelenos, Bay Street Beach was a haven for people of color.
Here, Gabaldón would bodysurf for hours, impressing two white lifeguards who loaned him a rescue board. With this heavy, 13-foot board, Gabaldón taught himself to surf, becoming the first documented Black surfer in America. He eventually took to riding the waves in Malibu, paddling six miles north and another six miles back, because he knew he would not be welcome walking on most of Santa Monica s beaches.
The words Hottinger s Family Meats stretches above the doorway of a one-story, red-tile roofed building in an industrial corner of Chino near warehouses and railroad tracks. The business is one of the last reminders that ranches and dairies that once ruled this swath of the Inland Empire.
Ben Hottinger at work at Hottinger Family Meats in Chino. (Courtesy of Hottinger Family Meats)
Founded in 1948 by Swiss immigrant Henry Hottinger, the intimate butcher shop has been owned by the same family for four generations. When we built this place, there wasn t anything here, it was wide open, says 79-year-old Ben Hottinger, Henry s youngest son. My dad bought 12 acres but what we have left here is an acre. That s it.